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Review: Ivo Graham, Latitude 2017

By Bruce Dessau on 16/7/2017

If you are a comedian with a posh background I guess you can either attempt to hide it or embrace it. For a while Jack Whitehall tried on other personae onstage. I saw him in a Stewart Lee phase and a Russell Brand phase. But he only really found his voice when he drew on who he really was and started to do material as an unashamed privileged posho.

Ivo Graham seems to have gone route one on this. As long as I've been seeing him he has talked about being an Old Etonian. One of the nice ones, of course, as he quipped onstage while making a joke about David Cameron and Eddie Redmayne. Not that the polite Latitude audience was likely to have a problem with a public school educated stand-up.

Graham's afternoon set, presumably a trailer for his forthcoming Edinburgh show, Educated Guess, finds him still playing the pampered manchild in his mid-twenties. Though not always that pampered. His explained how his father was generous enough to pay for him to come on the family holiday in the South of France, but like a teething toddler he still had to sleep in the same room as his parents. Which was not ideal as the en suite toilet had a glass partition.

It is fortunate that Graham still looks as if he is barely out of sixth form (do they call it sixth form at Eton?) as a lot of his spoddy act is about growing pains. Like Whitehall he played the haplessness card with impeccable style, opening by telling his audience he had just had an awkward encounter with a portaloo and later recalling the halcyon pre-broadband days of porn on USB sticks. Life has been one long struggle for poor Ivo. He had a battle to lose his virginity and has just about come to terms with the milestone that is no longer having a Young Person's Railcard.

This is all delivered in an amiable, charming, self-deprecating style. While others from his alma mater are future leaders who are destined to run the country, Graham has emerged with different qualities – "repressed, insecure and very good at ancient Greek." On the plus side his background has given him a solid basis for what is no doubt going to be a successful comedy career.